


Slumber Party: Part 2

by apollos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Selfies, Sleepovers, post 9x09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:09:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Without creepy witches and with girl talk, Charlie is back from Oz, Dean is dealing with the past few weeks, and a proper slumber party is held. Dean just really needs a friend. Charlie knows that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slumber Party: Part 2

With the angel safely out of Sam’s body, Sam is quite tired and understandably quite pissed at Dean, and spends all of his time sleeping in his room. With his stolen grace Cas comes and goes in the compound, bringing Dean small tokens of the outside world—one day it’s a comic book he (rightly) thinks Dean will like featuring a simple-minded hero and morality scale, the next it’s a pie from the best bakery in England, and the day after that an AC/DC tour shirt signed by the band members that Dean has no idea how he attained—but he never stays for long, angel duties sweeping him away from Dean. Kevin is dead and Crowley is unbearable and so Dean is alone, mopey, and bordering on alcoholism once again.

That is, until Charlie shows up. Dean is surprised when his phone rings and he sees her name across the screen. He answers it, smiling a little despite all the reasons he shouldn’t be. “Charlie, hey! You get out of Oz?” he says in lieu of an actual greeting. He’s lounging on his bed, was about to crack into a bottle of liquor when she called.

“Yep!” Comes Charlie’s peppy voice from the other line. “I was thinking, do you maybe want to have another slumber party?”

“Is this one going to involve nasty old witches and shit?” Dean asks, but he knows the answer is yes even if it is. He’s desperate for a friend by this point. He rises off the bed and looks at the bottle, decides to walk back to the kitchen and put it away.

“Nope, just video games, movies, food and good old-fashioned girl talk,” Charlie says. Dean doesn’t even bother to refute the last one, just asks Charlie how long it’ll be before she gets there.

Within the hour Dean is sitting on the floor of his room, Charlie lounging on the bed. Charlie has her tablet on her lap, mindlessly poking at a bubble wrap app, the little pops ringing in Dean’s ear. “That’s when she kissed me.” Charlie is saying, referencing Dorothy and their adventures.

“Hot,” Dean says, grinning, out of obligation. The grin fades fast. “What happened next?”

“I got laid, of course, silly,” Charlie says, and she leans down to ruffle Dean’s hair, putting her tablet off to the side on the bed. Dean bats her hands away. “Now, what about you?”

“What about me?” Dean cranes her neck to look at her. “It’s lonely in Dean’s love land,” he says, his usual brand of self-deprecation.

“I find that very hard to believe, mister,” Charlie says. She closes the bubble wrap app and gives Dean her full attention. “What with that angel on your shoulder and all?”

“Cas?” Dean laughs, but his faces heats and he feels uncomfortable underneath his clothes. “Charlie, I’m like you, strictly into women.”

"Yeah, you’re like me,” Charlie says. Then, teasingly: “As gay as the night is long. At least for Cas.”

“Have you even met Cas?” Dean’s life is long and his memories are swimmy, humid things he has trouble diving into most days. He honestly can’t remember if Charlie has. Something tells him that she _should_ , because Cas is like second to Sam (maybe even first nowadays) and Charlie’s second to Cas, so it would make sense that they should meet. Or at least that’s the logic that he’s using at the moment.

Charlie rolls her eyes, waving her hands around in exaggerated motions. “I don’t have to. I’ve read the books. Sam’s told me about it. Heck, Dean _, you’ve_ told me all about it. And you know what you’re like?”

“What am I like?” Dean asks, humoring her.

“You’re like little eleven-year-old me when I got my first crush,” Charlie teases. She reaches out to touch his hair again, but he dodges her. “I mean, a lot more emotionally damaged and gruff and male, but the point is the same. You are a preteen girl, Dean, and you’re crushing hard on the angel next door.”

“Fuck you, Charlie,” Dean says.

“Ew, no.” She scrunches her nose.

Dean rolls his eyes and stands up, stretching. His back crackles and pops, reminding him that he is sore and stiff, spent. He looks at Charlie and prompts an eyebrow. “’S time is it?” he asks around a yawn.

“Like, eleven,” Charlie says. She scoops her tablet back in her arm and unlocks it. Dean peers at the background picture, a selfie of her and Dorothy outside Emerald City, their smiles so wide on their pressed-together faces that it reminds Dean of balloons filled to the brim with helium. He feels both a flare of affection and envy, happiness for Charlie and sadness for himself that’s making him feel like a shit friend. “Eleven thirty-four to be exact,” Charlie says, and it shakes Dean from his internal thought process.

“I am tired as fuck-all,” Dean says, and he sighs. “Sorry that I’m lame at slumber parties, Charlie.”

“It’s okay, I’m pretty tired too. Coming from Oz and all,” Charlie says. She stands up from Dean’s bed, cradling her tablet. She takes one arm away from the thing to sweep behind her then hurriedly replaces it. “All yours.”

Dean nods once. “Are you going back to Oz or is Little Miss Independent coming here?” he asks. He shrugs off his outer layer and throws the coat somewhere behind him.

Charlie frowns. “Don’t know yet,” she says. “Maybe both. I’m heading back in a few days, anyway, Dorothy is off doing some solo quest thingy that I couldn’t come with on. But I don’t think that’s a problem between us.”

Dean knows that that last part is directed at him and he bats it away. He takes the shirt Cas had brought him and resists the urge to nuzzle it to his cheek while Charlie’s watching. If he had gotten it for himself he would regard it as too precious to actually put on his body, but because it was a gift from Cas (and maybe because it smells a bit like Cas) he likes to wear to it to bed. He turns and looks pointedly at Charlie and says, “Goodnight, Charlie.”

“Night, Dean,” Charlie says. She looks pointedly at the shirt Dean’s cradling in a similar fashion to the way she’s holding her tablet, then at Dean, and winks. As she’s flitting out of the room she calls over her shoulder, “I hope you dream about angel boy.”

Dean doesn’t justify her with a response, only strips to his boxers and slides the shirt over his head before tucking himself into bed. He wants to maybe sneak out and grab something to drink, something to lull him into sleep, because every time he closes his eyes he sees Charlie’s stupid lock screen and wonders what it would like if he took a selfie with Cas. He imagines trying to explain the concept to Cas and Cas giving him that tilted-head sideways look, the little crease appearing in his brow, his lips jutted, and on that fantasy he floats into sleep, no alcohol needed.

He wakes in the morning and walks out of his room, scratching at his stomach underneath what he’s started to refer to as the Awesome Cas Shirt, and shares an awkward encounter with Sam on the way to the kitchen. Sam is pissed—Sam has every right to be pissed—and just seeing his face screwed up in such hatred towards Dean is enough to make Dean feel like taking a syringe of whiskey and injecting it directly into his bloodstream. He’s about to reach in the kitchen cabinet for some when Charlie appears, startling Dean.

“Charlie, Jesus Christ,” he says, clutching a hand to his chest.

“Think you got me confused with somebody else,” Charlie quips. She walks past Dean and reaches into the refrigerator like she lives there, pulling out a carton of milk. “How’d you sleep?”

“Well enough,” Dean says, still feeling unsettled. He pulls the refrigerator door open again before it can shut and pulls out a carton of eggs. “Omelet?”

“Yeah, sure,” Charlie says. “Did you dream of angel boy?”

“Didn’t dream at all,” is Dean’s response as he sets the eggs on the counter and gathers a frying pan. He greases it and sets it on a burner, turning on the stove. He’s not lying; he’s stopped dreaming since the incident with Sam and the angel. He likes to think it’s his body’s defense against nightmares, but he also has a suspicion that Cas might somehow be keeping them away for him since he let it slip that he suffered from them in casual conversation a few weeks ago. He’d said something as a joke, can’t even remember what it was, but since then his dreams have stopped, and the idea of Cas as a dream catcher has made its home in the back of his mind. He’s too afraid to ask him outright, doesn’t want to know the answer.

“Me neither.” Charlie shakes her head. “What a disappointment, am I right? Dreams are great.”

“Sure.” Dean cracks an egg into the pan. “How do you like your omelets?”

“Plain. Just pepper.” And then she is at Dean’s side, laying a hand on his arm as he shakes the frying pan to even out the egg. “Dean, are you okay?”

He looks at her, giving the best approximation of a _what the fuck are you talking about_ face he can muster. “What? Of course, Charlie,” he says.

“It’s just…” Charlie sticks her bottom lip out. “You seem sort of…spacy. And avoidant. And in denial. What happened while I was gone?”

“A lot,” Dean says. He turns his attention back to the omelet he’s preparing, cracks another egg into the pan. Picks the pepper up.

“You can tell me, you know,” Charlie says, and she sounds so sincere it burrows into Dean’s heart and tugs at the strings as he shakes pepper onto her omelet. “I’ve read the books. I know you don’t really have a lot of friends to talk to this sort of stuff about. And, well, I like to think we’re pretty damn good friends and that you can trust me. I know it’s hard, but Dean—more people exist outside of just Sam and Cas and anybody else you might’ve given an affectionate three-letter nickname to.” Dean can see her lips quirk in a weak smile at her little joke at the end, hesitant, from the corner of his eye while he focuses on the omelet.

Dean doesn’t quite sigh, but he does exhale more largely than usual. He prods at the omelet, considers. Sam is his brother, but that relationship is shot and probably never going to fully recover. Cas is flighty—fucking literally, Dean thinks with cruel irony—and necessary, but he can’t talk to Cas about Cas, and he can’t believe he thinks he needs to talk about Cas at all. A preteen girl in love with the angel next door, analyzing his every movement and word to try and uncover some grand secret about his feelings for her. He looks down at his chest, at the t-shirt Cas had gotten him, and something clicks in his brain. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and he’s sliding the omelet from the frying pan onto a plate, handing it to Charlie. “It’s a long-ass story, though.”

“Trust me, even with as good a hunter as my dear Dorothy is, I’ve got time,” Charlie says. She grins and brings the omelet to her face to inspect it closely. Dean begins to make his own, starts to tell the events of the past weeks to Charlie, as the lagging winter sun begins its ascent.


End file.
